The Free Software Foundation is reviewing Novell's right to sell new versions of Linux operating system software after the open-source community criticized Novell for teaming up with Microsoft. "The community of people wants to do anything they can to interfere with this deal and all deals like it. They have every reason to be deeply concerned that this is the beginning of a significant patent aggression by Microsoft," Eben Moglen, the Foundation's general counsel, said on Friday. Update: The FSF claims this is being hyped.

"This has been my experience of Linux too. I see it's generated the usual responses here: 'My distro works fine, it must be something your doing wrong...' ;-)"

The differences, by the very nature of a distribution, are minor. The real difference is in the support and how the support is delivered.

The reality is in computing *most* of the time if you have a problem *you* are doing something wrong. It is possible one distribution contains never versions of the software...or is set to *better* defaults.

The solution to the problem is often a *polite* post in the forum; chat on irc; or a phone call away....thats without *paid* support being available from certain vendors.